The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Non-volatile semiconductor memory (NVSM) has limited capacity and has a limited number of access events (i.e. life span of NVSM). An access event refers to an event when NVSM is written to, read from, or accessed to, for example, erase certain stored data. NVSM tends to degrade over time due to “wear and tear” experienced during access events. Increased frequency of access decreases the reliable operating life of NVSM.
Host data (user data) that is stored in NVSM is typically compressible. For this reason, host data is compressed to minimize storage space. Host data is also compressed to minimize the number of memory cells of the NVSM accessed during an access event. This reduces the number of access events per memory cell.
The host data is compressed by a host (e.g., a desktop, laptop or handheld computer) at a file system level. The compressed host data is provided to a NVSM drive as host data sectors. The NVSM drive stores the host data sectors in NVSM. The stored host data sectors are decompressed by the host to an original format when read from the NVSM drive.